The next great Mac Game Development Book

The track record of iDevGames putting any non forum content online is well known.

The best option for putting stuff online is to just host it completely separately. That way it is safe from website content management system changes / upgrades / downgrades. This also prevents getting stuck in the red tape of committees deciding what and what should not go in.

(Note: This was one of the reasons we ended up launching CreateMacGames)

That is a good point. Its wise for individual writers to self host, but at the same time these forums are the ideal place to organize, advertise and guide new users to a common resource.

A single source of mac game dev tutorials seems necessary as so much is scattered across the internet.

For instance, had you not mentioned Flipsquare in this thread I would have never even remembered just how far you'd gone and what the name of the project was.

Dan has done a good job of piling the latest resources on the home page here, why not mirror those posts and build some central location for tracking the ever growing list in a subforum where its less likely to get buried in too many random locations?

I could just do that in this thread, but this more of a "hey who is doing or has done something and whats the next step" thread, and for some unexplainable reason Carlos has never given me god like power here...I wonder why

Forum threads are definitely not the place to list and link to the resources as they age so quickly.

If the forum was used though due to other parts of the site being closed to us then maybe they could be placed in sticky threads. These threads should be locked to prevent noise and clutter filing them up and distracting from the actual content.

igame3d Wrote:I remember some here telling me there was no market for game making software on the Mac...

I was one of those un-believers in Mac game making software. To some extent, I still believe the market is limited. Yeah, Unity seems to be doing pretty well, I readily admit that (and a well-deserved congratulations to them!). There is something really strange to me about the Mac game market nowadays. Apple has been selling massive amounts of new Macs every year now. Almost everyone I know either has one or is thinking about getting one. It wasn't like that just three years ago. So where the heck are all the new Mac game programming sites I would have expected? Where are all the great new games? And indeed, where are the books? I know that publishers are saying there is no market for them, but... there are an awful lot of new Macs out there nowadays!

A friend of mine told me that he dropped by iDG a few weeks ago to check it out and said he had no idea what people were talking about. There's no place for beginners here. No way to take the first steps other than to say, `Help I'm a N00b!!!', only to be quickly shredded to spit in one or two replies. Forums alone are a terrible single source of information -- especially beginners. But it seems like that's all the Mac game development community has to offer at the moment. "Anybody got any good tutorials on OpenGL and Cocoa?", will get the same 'ol replies we've been cranking out for years. Often times we are left to link to outdated material like NeHe. iDevGames seems to have distilled itself into a pack of talented folks, which seems to be a mixed blessing. It's good because the info to noise ratio is very high, but bad because it is not easily approachable IMHO.

I agree that there should be another site or two which handle community content. I don't think that another forum would be needed unless iDG went tits up, but separate content carriers would be great.

Anyone knows what finally happened to the postmortems? Last thing I heard a proofreader was hired to check them, but that was months ago. I don't think a book could be made just out of them, but a few could probably be used to complement one, or simply to complement/exemplify tutorials.

My understanding was that all the postmortems were in the content management system. They were then proof read only never to be seen again. Maybe someone who has access to the content system can let us know if they are still there or not?

BeyondCloister Wrote:My understanding was that all the postmortems were in the content management system. They were then proof read only never to be seen again. Maybe someone who has access to the content system can let us know if they are still there or not?

There are almost fifty postmortems in the CMS; at a quick glance, a few are marked as empty, and a few are quite short so I'm not sure if they're missing content or not - however, I'm not sure if any of those postmortems have been proof-read; I believe all the proof-read postmortems (and articles) are still waiting to be uploaded to the CMS...

I also have a dump of the CMS database from before the last major upheaval; I'm not sure if that contains any postmortems which are not currently present in the CMS...

I do remember there being postmortems in the CMS and looking over them as part of the review team prior to the official proof reader being employed. I would have thought that they were proof read and edited in the CMS and not taken out and put back in again.

I know my postmortem for Industrial Revolution was in there. Is it still in there? If it is do you have power to bring it online?

Sounds to me like there is enough sitting on or waiting to be uploaded to the CMS to shop around to publishers, or at least to post to lulu.com or such places and make on demand publishing available.

It also sounds like a good time to archive whatever is in there, just in case something goes wrong. I am not familiar with CMS, so I'm not sure what its capable of spitting out.

To answer AnotherJake, more mac sales does not equal more Mac game dev resources, at least not equally. For instance the 300 macs across the street at the elementary school don't require it, the 35 macs at my last job (so many years ago) wouldn't need such material (hell they couldn't be bothered to read a magazine or access the help menu).

I started digging for some Mac game dev tutorials last night while posting and found a few, some for sale, some for free, which led to my "scattered" comment.

Contemplate this for a minute ,five years ago there were no Apple stores, today there are no game dev books in the Apple stores...a new game dev book could certainly make its way into upscale malls across the globe given this new venue.
I know the last time I was at the Apple store spending $400, there wasn't a single book on their shelves I wanted/needed/ or was even mildly interested in, and basically when Apple employees asked "Can I help you?", I very much wanted to reply "Not unless you are game developer".

Apple now has their "sit with a pro(who probably used to work next door at the gap), learn the mac" thing for $99 a year.

But I noticed a missing space in their offerings...zero help for coding, I couldn't help but think that would be the next offering and was going to email them and say "Hey what about Xcode, thats all I need", but the email I received had no feedback method.

BeyondCloister Wrote:I would have thought that they were proof read and edited in the CMS and not taken out and put back in again.

If I remember correctly, Carlos stated that the postmortems and articles were sent on to the professional proof-reader he hired, which would imply that the proof-reader was not granted access to the CMS; also, at one time the postmortems and articles were being proofed in a WordPress blog before being integrated back into the CMS, but I can't remember where that fits into the timeline of CMS changes...

So, there may be two differently proofed copies of the postmortems and articles existing outside the CMS.

BeyondCloister Wrote:I know my postmortem for Industrial Revolution was in there. Is it still in there? If it is do you have power to bring it online?

There is a postmortem of Industrial Revolution in the CMS; I'm not sure if it is complete or missing content however, as it seems quite short, ending on the line "Industrial Revolution is a game that contains a lot of behind the scenes game logic." (Edit: from a look at the copy at cloisterroom.com, the copy in the CMS is incomplete.)

Whilst I technically have the power to bring the postmortem online (copying the missing content from the copy at cloisterroom.com), I'm hesitant to do so, as that isn't the domain I was granted power over, and I'm hesitant about treading on toes or exceeding my powers; if however Carlos or whoever is in charge of the postmortems wants me to go through the postmortems and fix them for upload, I'll do so...

igame3d Wrote:To answer AnotherJake, more mac sales does not equal more Mac game dev resources, at least not equally. For instance the 300 macs across the street at the elementary school don't require it, the 35 macs at my last job (so many years ago) wouldn't need such material (hell they couldn't be bothered to read a magazine or access the help menu).

Well, obviously that is entirely true. I think my point was that I see so many more private individuals using them outside of a work environment. Not that this helps make my case for individual use, but I read a story somewhere on the net today where Sun even added engineers to their Mac product because they had noticed all the Macbooks in use at airports and conferences. I was trying to balance my observation with the fact that forums aren't an ideal source of information for beginners, to help make the case that there may very well be a sizable market for such material as we are discussing. Of course, I do understand I'm preaching to the choir here, but still.

As for the postmortems, they are property of iDG, aren't they? I mean, unless they can be liberated from iDG, why bother? I know Carlos would like to have content available on the site, but it's literally been years since... never mind. I suppose I am suggesting that the group focus may be better served by looking entirely away from resources associated with iDevGames and just forgetting about them for now, as it seems to be a resource black hole of sorts.

sealfin Wrote:There is a postmortem of Industrial Revolution in the CMS; I'm not sure if it is complete or missing content however, as it seems quite short, ending on the line "Industrial Revolution is a game that contains a lot of behind the scenes game logic." (from a look at the copy at cloisterroom.com, the copy in the CMS is incomplete.)

Well that confirms that the completed ones we had worked on have been removed